🍊 4 Ways to stand out when looking for a job in tech for when changing careers

In my coaching work with career changers, clients often ask me “How do I stand out?” when applying to tech jobs.

My answer to that question is two-fold:

Play to your strengths based on your previous career achievements
Build a strong foundation on which to speak about your new skills in tech, preferably through a portfolio

This strategic approach to the job search sets up my clients for building resilience and confidence throughout the job search process.

You might be asking, That sounds great, but what can I DO to approach the job search in this way?

First, let’s talk about what it means to ‘stand out’ in the job search. You likely want to ‘stand out’ in a way that gets you interviews, not in a way that decreases the chances of connecting with recruiters and hiring managers. So for this conversation, let’s define ‘standing out’ as a process that provides you the best chances to get interviews and showcase your relevant background during interviews.

Standing out is more of a process than an action. It starts with your resume and continues during your interviews. It’s important to remember that you have control over some parts of the process but not the entire process.

Standing out as the right candidate for a specific role is a process that involves many factors, some of which have nothing to do with your work experience, technical skills or personality.

The parts under your control are your resume, technical abilities and interviewing skills. Outside of your control, are the company’s hiring practices, decision making process, timing and budget constraints and general readiness of the hiring manager and company to hire someone new.

Going forward, we are going to only concern ourselves with the parts of the process we can control: how you present yourself during the hiring process.

4 ways to stand out in the hiring process

Brand yourself as the best fit candidate
Lean on your domain expertise to market yourself
Create a career highlight reel using transferable skills
Network, a lot

Brand yourself as the best fit candidate

Pivoting into tech requires keeping up confidence in your new skills and how you will contribute in a tech role. When you own the title of a ‘Software Engineer’ or a ‘Product Designer’ EVEN if you have less than one year of experience in that field, you can create an image of yourself that the hiring manager can envision filling the open role they are hiring for.

Branding yourself is all about image you create of yourself as the best fit candidate, so learn to really ‘own’ the new role you are hiring into instead of hiding behind the ‘lack of experience’ narrative, which does not serve you.

Lean on your domain expertise to market yourself

When coming into tech from a previous career, you are brining domain expertise into the hiring process. If you were an educator, the domain knowledge is education and instruction. If you worked as a server, you have domain knowledge in restaurants and customer service. When looking for roles, look for companies that will value your domain knowledge, as the combination of technical skills and domain knowledge is very attractive to a company in that specific domain (ex. Edtech, Healthtech, Fintech, Marketing Tech).

Create a career highlight reel using transferable skills

Create clear and concise highlight reel from your past work experiences. Start with outcomes and then how you accomplished them, what tools, methods, skills you used. This can be used on your resume or not. Having stories prepared to answer interview questions will help you feel more confident during the interviews. Have a strong grasp on your transferable skills as they can help you showcase your professional experience in cross-team collaboration, project management skills and conflict resolution.

Network, a lot

Finally, keep networking! Junior roles are sometimes hard to find, so creating connections so that you are top of mind when roles do open up, is key for opening doors for yourself. Networking a lot also provides useful information on the job requirements, company culture and benefits. Now more than ever it’s important to build a vast network of people within the tech space, learn from them and ask for their support.